The Walking Dead returns with an exploding Roman candle of an episode

Well! That was a lot.

One of the more rewarding elements of sticking with The Walking Dead through its waning final years has been watching showrunner Angela Kang’s effort to avoid the listless, going-in-circles plotting that sometimes afflicted the show during weaker moments. That’s not to say we don’t still get the unfortunate treading-water installments here and there—we obviously do, and they suck—but any time the wheels spin for an hour, you can bet the next episode will do its level best to churn through some story, as though making up for lost time (which it sort of is).

So while it was a welcome twist to have the first arc of the final season end with the surprise death of Pope, who had been positioned as a Big Bad for the foreseeable future, “No Other Way” took a look at that momentum and said, “Hold my beer.” In short order, the entire Reaper organization has been decimated. Alexandria is lying in rubble. Negan takes off. The Commonwealth arrives, courtesy of Eugene, and invites our people to join the cause. Cut to six months later: Maggie’s defending the walls of Hilltop, someplace we haven’t seen in awhile, and a phalanx of threatening Commonwealth soldiers show up to do…something. Their leader? Daryl Dixon.

Like I said: a lot.

When we last checked in with our protagonists, Daryl’s Reaper ex-girlfriend, Leah, had just killed her boss, Pope, and sicced her crew on our beloved motorcycle-riding badass. The Reaper home base of Meridian was in the midst of assault from walkers, shepherded there by Maggie and Negan. And Leah had just unleashed a very silly-looking fireworks display on the undead, as the humans ran for cover. It was an exciting place to leave off—and this episode delivered on that promise, with explosions of both the literal and storytelling variety.

After a quick reminder of the aforementioned fireworks display (Maggie fights off a Reaper and then we get to watch him blow up!), it’s a sort of cat-and-mouse game within the walls of Meridian, as Daryl, Gabriel, and the others try to evade Reapers, with Maggie and Negan arguing over the value of getting out with their lives or sticking around to kill the baddies and get the food supply. Of course, it’s about that, but it’s also not: Maggie and Negan’s discussion is symbolic of a lot more. And by the end, when Maggie’s gone off to find zombie Alden and put him out of his undead misery, Negan shows up to drop a truth bomb: Maggie’s never going to let the past go, and it’s only a matter of time before she tries to kill him, too. So, he leaves.

But before that, holy hell, does the show have some fun exacting bloody vengeance on the Reapers. First, Daryl gets a one-on-one takedown of Austin, that ends with choking the guy out in silence while Leah prepares to break down the door. Next, there’s Gabriel, listening to an entire entreaty from the mad Reaper priest to lay down his weapons and embrace his faith, only to shrug it off and stab the guy in the chest. Then, there’s the killer three-on-one fight sequence with Carver versus Maggie, Elijah, and Negan. And that doesn’t even end in death; taking the most obnoxious Reaper hostage is a smart play, but it does mean Elijah has to play the waiting game on revenge for his sister.

Still, it’s all worth it once we get to the episode’s equivalent of a showdown. In the courtyard, what seems like a situation where Leah and her people are in control (and planning to kill Daryl et. al) quickly has its tables turned, as Gabriel kills the sniper and gets a cool-guy “You were expecting someone else?” zinger through the walkie talkie. And then—after all that intensity—Maggie immediately betrays Daryl’s guarantee that Leah and her people can leave in peace. She kills every Reaper and wounds Leah. It’s rare for The Walking Dead to deliver an episode so stuffed with fun, crowd-pleasing moments, but this one paid off in spades, even as it retained the icky moral ambiguity around Maggie’s behavior.

There was so much fun to be had at Meridian this week, it was almost a shame when we cut back to Alexandria, especially because the continuing drama with the storm and the walkers inside the walls was so uneven compared to what was going down at the Reaper encampment. For every tense and nervy little sequence (Aaron’s underwater struggle with a walker in the rapidly flooding basement), there was an abrupt and jarring edit (Lydia magically stringing a rope into the basement and Aaron escaping, all off-camera). In the case of the latter instance, I’m baffled: It’s like a second unit failed to make their shot schedule and just strung together what little they had. Honestly, it was weird to watch play out.

We only spent a few minutes with everyone else, but the little reunions at episode’s end were a nice, very old-school moment of Walking Dead “we’re a family, see?” sentiment that we tend to see every few episodes or so. In this case, watching Daryl absolutely lose his shit over the return of Connie was the highlight, but equally affecting—in opposite manner—was the quiet emotional gut-punch Lydia received when she realized Negan was gone. It was perfectly underplayed (the camera barely lingered on her face for more than a second), and captured exactly why that relationship had become so meaningful, for them and us: Morgan and McClincy are two of the best performers on the show. I’d like more of them together, please!

By the time the Commonwealth arrived, it felt like the show was finally announcing how this last season is really going to play out. Some will fall for the Commonwealth’s facade of civility (but Daryl? Really?), and some will resist (hi, Maggie), but the struggle against the militarized outpost of humanity is clearly going to define the rest of the season. It’s a smart move: This is one of the only things we’ve never really seen before on the show, so leaning into it—as opposed to the been-there, killed-that Reapers storyline—will help keep things fresh on a series that, more often than it probably wants to admit, can feel like it’s running on the fumes of fumes. So bring on the Commonwealth, and the weirdness, and Josh Hamilton’s delightfully uptight middle-manager of the apocalypse.

Stray observations

• I can’t be the only one startled that Elijah actually lived, right? By the time he was lying in the dirt at Meridian, telling Maggie to avenge his family tragedy, it seemed obvious. But no, just a flesh wound!
• Bonus points for Aaron literally smashing that walker’s head to a pulp during the aforementioned underwater fight scene.
• We’re still doing the “Gabriel wrestles with his lack of faith” thing, but at least it feels more perfunctory. Dude’s made his choice.
• At first, I struggled to recall why Maggie gave a shit about returning to Alden, but then I remembered: He was the Savior she gave a chance to back when they were all locked up at Hilltop, and he then became the emblem of the “people can change” banner for her.
• “Choices—do they even matter any more?” A fitting question for the final year of The Walking Dead, Daryl.
• Re: The Commonwealth, there’s something about the idea of a seemingly benevolent group of wealthy folks descending upon a scrappy little community that has survived on its own forever, taking it over, and proceeding to destroy it it in the most obnoxious way possible that is really connecting, though I can’t for the life of me imagine why.